Busyness leads to bad decisions • Hacker News Board

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#61

Post by ryandrake » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Frost1x wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor. These sort of time luxury, magnitude of free/disposable income, and free cognitive load (less stress, etc.) aspects are all too frequently overlooked when shunning the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. I remember the sort of stress I had first starting out simply keeping up with utility bill payment schedules to avoid late fees. I had the…

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.

Class B is a different species. If they stop working, their money will still go up, indefinitely due to passive investments. The idea of getting to $0 is ridiculous because they get richer every day by doing nothing. Class B’s lifestyle is totally different than Class A.

Class A people like to invent all these other sub-classes to distance themselves from others in Class A: middle class. Upper middle class. Lower middle class. Middle upper middle class. It’s all pretty silly. We all have much more in common with each other than we do with people who get richer every day simply by existing.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#62

Post by DataWorker » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #61

alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.…

You mean young people and old people, working age vs retirees. For the most part, that’s how wealth works. The more years a person works, the closer they are to group b. If young people had the same wealth as older people, that would be horrific!

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#63

Post by TurkishPoptart » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #61

alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.…

You nailed it. There was a thread on economics and Piketty's work which summed it up well: do you live off your labor? Or your capital? The comparison perfectly matches your description of Class A and B. The only way for us A folks to get ahead is to acquire capital.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#64

Post by TurkishPoptart » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 6:08 PM UTC

DarwinMailApp wrote: post #23

I could not agree more. For years I was just doing things for the sake of being busy.. crossing tasks off my todo list on a daily basis. I felt so accomplished, however, I was not really getting a lot of useful work done! -------------------------- What did I do? - I started thinking about the tasks I needed to do, assessing if they were actually important to begin with. - I often found that they were not adding valu…

What framework is your site built in? And what did you use to build the application itself? Thanks.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#65

Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Frost1x wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>One of the many ways it's expensive to be poor. These sort of time luxury, magnitude of free/disposable income, and free cognitive load (less stress, etc.) aspects are all too frequently overlooked when shunning the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. I remember the sort of stress I had first starting out simply keeping up with utility bill payment schedules to avoid late fees. I had the…

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

In the Anglo-American world "class" has a connotation of social standing and cultural position; probably because of the quasi-feudal meaning of "class" in the British isles (something you're born into). So few people in North America consider themselves "working class" for that reason.

However in the classic socialist sense of the world, or in other parts of the world, "working class" often just means "work for someone else."

And in that definition even I, an overpaid Google employee, am "working class"

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#66

Post by mnm1 » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #61

alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.…

Well put, but I'd argue it's the Class B people who invented all the sub-classes for Class A. Class A just passively accepts those divisions thinking that it is of their own ideas and doing--it's not. This is a very important distinction. It's through these divisions that Class A controls Class B. These divisions are not just of social class but also of race, ethnicity, nationality, etc. Basically all the hate points of bigots are power plays by Class B to keep people in Class A down. Class A people that hate each other and create conflicts between each other are the bread and butter of control that Class B depends on to keep this charade going. Without those people stirring shit up, Class A might actually realize what's happening and call for heads of Class B to literally roll. It's happened in the past, but the same order reestablishes itself over and over throughout history.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#67

Post by SketchySeaBeast » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

DataWorker wrote: post #62

ryandrake wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.…

You mean young people and old people, working age vs retirees. For the most part, that’s how wealth works. The more years a person works, the closer they are to group b. If young people had the same wealth as older people, that would be horrific!

Most retirees are racing against the clock still - they aren't getting ever richer, and instead crunched the numbers and retired with what they hope is enough to get them to their deaths.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#68

Post by throwaway07Ju19 » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 7:30 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #61

alexgmcm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans. The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don't want to accept it. I'd always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn't that high, we don't have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or…

You’re exactly right. There are two economic classes that are meaningfully different: Class A is N missed paychecks away from $0. N might be a small number for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It might be large for high earning professionals, and it might be “greater than my life expectancy” for retirees, but the common thread is if they stop working, their money goes down every day and will one day reach zero.…

Does anyone know if there is existing terminology for Class A/B ? Investor class / working class ? Or maybe capital class / labor class.

The typically discussed classes in the US are lower, middle, upper which I always took to be one std below the mean income (lower) and one std above mean income (upper). Perhaps if we used mean days until $0 dollars in the bank if you stopped working it would be more useful.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#69

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 7:41 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #57

crispyambulance wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the StackOverflow community may be a bit trigger-happy, Not "a bit"... actually very trigger happy. Even perfectly reasonable questions that don't exactly fit what a quite a lot overzealous members consider to be on-topic and properly researched questions get slammed hard. It very much is a form of Calvinist thinking at work, IMHO. There's a notion of "worthiness" that the asker has to meet. It's a needlessly ha…

I tried to explain it's not a SO thing. The Help Vampire describes a real phenomenon, codified by someone not on SO (search for "stackoverflow" in the text...). If you feel it's premature, you're probably lucky to have never dealt with them. ESR's advice is a bit smug -- I don't like the guy myself -- but will clearly help anyone to ask good tech questions; it also predates SO by years if not decades. Put yourself in…

If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.

In fact the answers on SO have a very mediocre SNR. There are some bullseyes, but just as often answers are some combination of misleadingly devoted to an edge case instead of the core problem, nitpicky for the sake of appearances while contributing no real value, out of date, or just plain wrong.

Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.

It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.

Re: Busyness leads to bad decisions

#70

Post by the_af » Thu, Dec 05, 2019, 7:56 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #69

the_af wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to explain it's not a SO thing. The Help Vampire describes a real phenomenon, codified by someone not on SO (search for "stackoverflow" in the text...). If you feel it's premature, you're probably lucky to have never dealt with them. ESR's advice is a bit smug -- I don't like the guy myself -- but will clearly help anyone to ask good tech questions; it also predates SO by years if not decades. Put yourself in…

If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop. In fact the answers on SO have a very mediocre SNR. There are some bullseyes, but just as often answers are some combination of misleadingly devoted to an edge case instead of the core problem, nitpicky for the sake of appearances while contributing no real value, out of date, or just plain wrong. Help vampires are the least…

> If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.

If most people stop, the community ceases to exist. Such is the real danger with Help Vampires.

To be clear, I'm not talking about myself. I don't have the time to answer questions on SO (though I answered some, years ago) and admire the people who do. I'm also not a moderator there, because who has the time?

> Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.

Only because the policies enforced to stop them were mostly successful. When you solve the most pressing problem, the next problem in the line becomes the most pressing one :)

> It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.

There is such a thing in SO. As you can imagine, some users complain about it and are unhappy with this solution. Some people are so unhappy that they proposed forking SO to create some other community with different editorial/moderation standards. Care to guess how successful they were?